afternoon; wouldn't talk to Lenina's friends (of whom they met dozens in the
ice-cream soma bar between the wrestling bouts); and in spite of his misery
absolutely refused to take the half-gramme raspberry sundae which she pressed
upon him. "I'd rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty. Not somebody else,
however jolly."
"A gramme in time saves nine," said Lenina, producing a bright treasure of
sleep-taught wisdom. Bernard pushed away the proffered glass impatiently.
"Now don't lose your temper," she said. "Remember one cubic centimetre cures ten
gloomy sentiments."
"Oh, for Ford's sake, be quiet!" he shouted.
Lenina shrugged her shoulders. "A gramme is always better than a damn," she
concluded with dignity, and drank the sundae herself.
On their way back across the Channel, Bernard insisted on stopping his propeller
and hovering on his helicopter screws within a hundred feet of the waves. The
weather had taken a change for the worse; a south-westerly wind had sprung up,
the sky was cloudy.
"Look," he commanded.
"But it's horrible," said Lenina, shrtnking back from the window. She was appalled by
the rushing emptiness of the night, by the black foam-flecked water heaving
beneath them, by the pale face of the moon, so haggard and distracted among the
hastening clouds. "Let's turn on the radio. Quick!" She reached for the dialling knob
on the dash-board and turned it at random.
"… skies are blue inside of you," sang sixteen tremoloing falsettos, "the weather's
always …"
Then a hiccough and silence. Bernard had switched of the current.
"I want to look at the sea in peace," he said. "One can't even look with that beastly
noise going on."
"But it's lovely. And I don't want to look."
"But I do," he insisted. "It makes me feel as though …" he hesitated, searching for
words with which to express himself, "as though I were more me, if you see what I
mean. More on my own, not so completely a part of something else. Not just a cell
in the social body. Doesn't it make you feel like that, Lenina?"
But Lenina was crying. "It's horrible, it's horrible," she kept repeating. "And how can
you talk like that about not wanting to be a part of the social body? After all, every
one works for every one else. We can't do without any one. Even Epsilons …"
"Yes, I know," said Bernard derisively. "'Even Epsilons are useful'! So am I. And I
damned well wish I weren't!"
Lenina was shocked by his blasphemy. "Bernard!" She protested in a voice of
amazed distress. "How can you?"
In a different key, "How can I?" he repeated meditatively. "No, the real problem is:
How is it that I can't, or rather–because, after all, I know quite well why I can't–what
would it be like if I could, if I were free–not enslaved by my conditioning."
"But, Bernard, you're saying the most awful things."
"Don't you wish you were free, Lenina?"
"I don't know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time.
Everybody's happy nowadays."
He laughed, "Yes, 'Everybody's happy nowadays.' We begin giving the children that
at five. But wouldn't you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In
your own way, for example; not in everybody else's way."
"I don't know what you mean," she repeated. Then, turning to him, "Oh, do let's go
back, Bernard," she besought; "I do so hate it here."
"Don't you like being with me?"
"But of course, Bernard. It's this horrible place."
"I thought we'd be more … more together here–with nothing but the sea and moon.
More together than in that crowd, or even in my rooms. Don't you understand that?"
"I don't understand anything," she said with decision, determined to preserve her
incomprehension intact. "Nothing. Least of all," she continued in another tone "why
you don't take soma when you have these dreadful ideas of yours. You'd forget all
about them. And instead of feeling miserable, you'd be jolly. So jolly," she repeated
and smiled, for all the puzzled anxiety in her eyes, with what was meant to be an
inviting and voluptuous cajolery.
He looked at her in silence, his face unresponsive and very grave–looked at her
intently. After a few seconds Lenina's eyes flinched away; she uttered a nervous
little laugh, tried to think of something to say and couldn't. The silence prolonged
itself.
When Bernard spoke at last, it was in a small tired voice. "All right then," he said,
"we'll go back." And stepping hard on the accelerator, he sent the machine rocketing
up into the sky. At four thousand he started his propeller. They flew in silence for a
minute or two. Then, suddenly, Bernard began to laugh. Rather oddly, Lenina
thought, but still, it was laughter.
"Feeling better?" she ventured to ask.
For answer, he lifted one hand from the controls and, slipping his arm around her,
began to fondle her breasts.
"Thank Ford," she said to herself, "he's all right again."
Half an hour later they were back in his rooms. Bernard swallowed four tablets of
soma at a gulp, turned on the radio and television and began to undress.
"Well," Lenina enquired, with significant archness when they met next afternoon on
the roof, "did you think it was fun yesterday?"
Bernard nodded. They climbed into the plane. A little jolt, and they were off.
"Every one says I'm awfully pneumatic," said Lenina reflectively, patting her own
legs.
"Awfully." But there was an expression of pain in Bernard's eyes. "Like meat," he
was thinking.
She looked up with a certain anxiety. "But you don't think I'm too plump, do you?"
He shook his head. Like so much meat.
"You think I'm all right." Another nod. "In every way?"
"Perfect," he said aloud. And inwardly. "She thinks of herself that way. She doesn't
mind being meat."
Lenina smiled triumphantly. But her satisfaction was premature.
"All the same," he went on, after a little pause, "I still rather wish it had all ended
differently."
"Differently?" Were there other endings?
"I didn't want it to end with our going to bed," he specified.
Lenina was astonished.
"Not at once, not the first day."
"But then what …?"
He began to talk a lot of incomprehensible and dangerous nonsense. Lenina did
her best to stop the ears of her mind; but every now and then a phrase would insist
on becoming audible. "… to try the effect of arresting my impulses," she heard him
say. The words seemed to touch a spring in her mind.
"Never put off till to-morrow the fun you can have to-day," she said gravely.
"Two hundred repetitions, twice a week from fourteen to sixteen and a half," was all
his comment. The mad bad talk rambled on. "I want to know what passion is," she
heard him saying. "I want to feel something strongly."
"When the individual feels, the community reels," Lenina pronounced.
"Well, why shouldn't it reel a bit?"
"Bernard!"
But Bernard remained unabashed.
"Adults intellectually and during working hours," he went on. "Infants where feeling
and desire are concerned."
"Our Ford loved infants."
Ignoring the interruption. "It suddenly struck me the other day," continued Bernard,
"that it might be possible to be an adult all the time."
"I don't understand." Lenina's tone was firm.
"I know you don't. And that's why we went to bed together yesterday–like
infants–instead of being adults and waiting."
"But it was fun," Lenina insisted. "Wasn't it?"
"Oh, the greatest fun," he answered, but in a voice so mournful, with an expression
so profoundly miserable, that Lenina felt all her triumph suddenly evaporate.
Perhaps he had found her too plump, after all.
"I told you so," was all that Fanny said, when Lenina came and made her
confidences. "It's the alcohol they put in his surrogate."
"All the same," Lenina insisted. "I do like him. He has such awfully nice hands. And
the way he moves his shoulders–that's very attractive." She sighed. "But I wish he
weren't so odd."
§ 2
HALTING for a moment outside the door of the Director's room, Bernard drew a
deep breath and squared his shoulders, bracing himself to meet the dislike and
disapproval which he was certain of finding within. He knocked and entered.
"A permit for you to initial, Director," he said as airily as possible, and laid the paper
on the writing-table.
The Director glanced at him sourly. But the stamp of the World Controller's Office
was at the head of the paper and the signature of Mustapha Mond, bold and black,
across the bottom. Everything was perfectly in order. The director had no choice. He
pencilled his initials–two small pale letters abject at the feet of Mustapha Mond–and
was about to return the paper without a word of comment or genial Ford-speed,
when his eye was caught by something written in the body of the permit.
"For the New Mexican Reservation?" he said, and his tone, the face he lifted to
Bernard, expressed a kind of agitated astonishment.
Surprised by his surprise, Bernard nodded. There was a silence.
The Director leaned back in his chair, frowning. "How long ago was it?" he said,
speaking more to himself than to Bernard. "Twenty years, I suppose. Nearer
twenty-five. I must have been your age …" He sighed and shook his head.
Bernard felt extremely uncomfortable. A man so conventional, so scrupulously
correct as the Director–and to commit so gross a solecism! lt made him want to hide
his face, to run out of the room. Not that he himself saw anything intrinsically
objectionable in people talking about the remote past; that was one of those
hypnop?dic prejudices he had (so he imagined) completely got rid of. What made
him feel shy was the knowledge that the Director disapproved–disapproved and yet
had been betrayed into doing the forbidden thing. Under what inward compulsion?
Through his discomfort Bernard eagerly listened.
"I had the same idea as you," the Director was saying. "Wanted to have a look at
the savages. Got a permit for New Mexico and went there for my summer holiday.
With the girl I was having at the moment. She was a Beta-Minus, and I think" (he
shut his eyes), "I think she had yellow hair. Anyhow she was pneumatic, particularly
pneumatic; I remember that. Well, we went there, and we looked at the savages,
and we rode about on horses and all that. And then–it was almost the last day of
my leave–then … well, she got lost. We'd gone riding up one of those revolting
mountains, and it was horribly hot and oppressive, and after lunch we went to sleep.
Or at least I did. She must have gone for a walk, alone. At any rate, when I woke
up, she wasn't there. And the most frightful thunderstorm I've ever seen was just
bursting on us. And it poured and roared and flashed; and the horses broke loose
and ran away; and I fell down, trying to catch them, and hurt my knee, so that I
could hardly walk. Still, I searched and I shouted and I searched. But there was no
sign of her. Then I thought she must have gone back to the rest-house by herself.
So I crawled down into the valley by the way we had come. My knee was agonizingly
painful, and I'd lost my soma. It took me hours. I didn't get back to the rest-house
till after midnight. And she wasn't there; she wasn't there," the Director repeated.
There was a silence. "Well," he resumed at last, "the next day there was a search.
But we couldn't find her. She must have fallen into a gully somewhere; or been
eaten by a mountain lion. Ford knows. Anyhow it was horrible. It upset me very
much at the time. More than it ought to have done, I dare say. Because, after all,
it's the sort of accident that might have happened to any one; and, of course, the
social body persists although the component cells may change." But this
sleep-taught consolation did not seem to be very effective. Shaking his head, "I
actually dream about it sometimes," the Director went on in a low voice. "Dream of
being woken up by that peal of thunder and finding her gone; dream of searching
and searching for her under the trees." He lapsed into the silence of reminiscence.
"You must have had a terrible shock," said Bernard, almost enviously.
At the sound of his voice the Director started into a guilty realization of where he
was; shot a glance at Bernard, and averting his eyes, blushed darkly; looked at him
again with sudden suspicion and, angrily on his dignity, "Don't imagine," he said,
"that I'd had any indecorous relation with the girl. Nothing emotional, nothing
long-drawn. It was all perfectly healthy and normal." He handed Bernard the permit.
"I really don't know why I bored you with this trivial anecdote." Furious with himself
for having given away a discreditable secret, he vented his rage on Bernard. The
look in his eyes was now frankly malignant. "And I should like to take this
opportunity, Mr. Marx," he went on, "of saying that I'm not at all pleased with the
reports I receive of your behaviour outside working hours. You may say that this is
not my business. But it is. I have the good name of the Centre to think of. My
workers must be above suspicion, particularly those of the highest castes. Alphas
